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Ethics

Review Essays of Academic, Professional &
Technical Books in the Humanities &
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The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood by Jeremy Campbell (W.W. Norton)
A bold new exploration of ethics and philosophy,
The Liar's Taleextols the benefits of falsehood. Fireflies find mates
by duping rivals with patterns of deceptive flashes. Politicians win elections
by distorting statistics and telling half-truths. The devices of falsehood,
whether simple exaggeration, pretense, or barefaced lies; are hard to resist and
easy to employ. Now, in a provocative work that turns Sissela Bok's Lying
on its head, Jeremy Campbell presents a daring inquiry into the nature of
deception. With insight into rhetoric, language, and the sciences, Campbell
launches his discussion with Darwin and evolutionary biology, and from there
builds a foundation of philosophical evidence that is both counterintuitive and
highly engaging. We encounter the purism of the ancients and their battles with
the Sophists, the many faces of falsehood decried by Montaigne, the dark ethos
of Kant and Nietzsche, and the reckless shift made by Derrida and the
postmodernists favoring "meaning" at the expense of truth. Unsettling and highly
original,
The Liar's Taleis sure to provoke a new debate about truth and ethics.

Lies are often so subtle, so deftly woven into easily
acceptable truths that we often fail to recognize them. Fireflies find mates by
duping rivals with pat­terns of deceptive flashes; politicians win elections by
distorting statistics and spouting half-truths; artists often prize imagination
and beauty over sim­ple realism. We accept these events as conventional
occurrences and rarely question how they came to pass nor do we debate their
merit.

Beginning with a discussion of evolutionary biology and the
necessity (and ultimate value) of deceit in the animal kingdom, Campbell asks
the unsettling question of whether falsehood might, in fact, be instinctual, or
at least natural. From there, Campbell describes the classical philosophical
foun­dation of truth as the ultimate category of knowl­edge and organization,
focusing on Aristotle and his battles with the Sophists, early philosophers who
claimed that truth was unstable and illusory. This division within classical
thought has reappeared throughout history, even in the European enlighten­ment,
which centered on the possibility of individual knowledge and liberty.
Campbell's seamless integra­tion of art, literature, and philosophy shows how
the nineteenth century's focus on individuality, imagina­tion, and irony
eventually began to privilege artifice and fraud over nature and simplicity.
Ultimately, this laid the foundation for the twentieth century's philo­sophical
and cultural apotheosis of lying, exempli­fied by figures such as Freud,
Wittgenstein, and Derrida---all of whom made deception and ambigu­ity a main
thematic component of their thought.

In its vast scope and fluid integration of a mul­titude of
disciplines and ideas,
The Liar's Taleis a daring inquiry into the nature of
deception and its place in our cultural heritage. Unsettling and
highly original,
The Liar's Talepromises to provoke re­newed interest and
debate about truth and ethics.